Reducing Harm. Building Understanding. Supporting Healing.
Second Assault is an advocacy and educational initiative focused on institutional retraumatization, trauma-informed systems reform, and survivor-centered education.
Our Mission
When survivors seek help from systems meant to protect them — including medical care, law enforcement, schools, courts, and mental health services, they may instead encounter disbelief, coercion, misdiagnosis, or neglect.
Second Assault is dedicated to improving how institutions understand and respond to trauma, dissociation, and child maltreatment through survivor-informed education, research, advocacy, and systems awareness. Our mission is to reduce institutional retraumatization and promote more ethical, trauma-informed, and compassionate responses to survivors.
What We Do
Second Assault is dedicated to improving how systems understand and respond to child maltreatment and trauma. By integrating lived experience, clinical insight, and research, the organization works to reduce retramatization, elevate survivor voices, and promote more ethical, informed, and compassionate approaches to care
Education & Training
Trauma-informed presentations and educational programming for professionals, students, and organizations. These trainings integrate current research on child maltreatment, trauma, and dissociation with survivor perspectives and lived experience to promote a more nuanced, compassionate, and informed understanding of child victimization and its long-term impacts.
Storytelling & Advocacy
Survivor perspectives are essential to understanding institutional retraumatization and improving systems responses. Second Assault values lived experience, survivor narratives, and community-informed feedback as part of its educational and advocacy efforts.
Community and Collaboration
Meaningful systemic change requires collaboration between survivors, professionals, researchers, educators, and advocates. Second Assault seeks to foster dialogue, awareness, and interdisciplinary understanding to promote safer and more compassionate responses to trauma.
“Nearly three-fourths (73%) of children described receiving a negative reaction to disclosure”
(Elliott et al., 2022)
Why This Matters
For many survivors, the trauma does not end when the abuse stops.
When survivors seek help from systems meant to protect them, including healthcare, law enforcement, schools, courts, and mental health services, they may instead encounter disbelief, coercion, misdiagnosis, or neglect.
These responses can create a “Second Assault”: a form of institutional betrayal that deepens harm, delays healing, and silences survivors.
Preventing this harm requires trauma-informed, survivor-centered systemic change.
Those most impacted by developmental trauma are often the ones least served by existing models of care.
Systems Often Lack Necessary Support for Survivors
Developmental trauma does not just affect a child’s sense of safety, it shapes the foundation that they had to develop from.
Trauma Shapes Development
Healing requires more than addressing past abuse, it requires opportunities to build what, for many survivors, never existed.
Healing Requires More Than Survival
“Do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better.”
- Maya Angelou
Work With Second Assault
Second Assault partners with clinicians, institutions, and organizations to improve how developmental trauma and child maltreatment are understood and addressed.
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